Virginia redistricting plans put focus on rural areas
Michael Shull never imagined that a Democrat from the wealthy suburbs of Washington would represent his community in Congress. His corner of Virginia, with its sprawling farms and winding country roads, has been electing Republicans for more than three decades.
What followed was an unusual nationwide redistricting battle, with Democrats and Republicans redrawing congressional lines to boost their chances in the November midterm elections. Virginia could be next as voters consider a new map that would combine conservative rural areas with liberal suburbs, diluting Republicans’ electoral influence.
“Politicians should be elected to be the voice of their people,” said Shull, a Republican member of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors. “Not the voice of their party.”
The vote on the constitutional amendment will take place on April 21 and early voting has begun. If voters pass the referendum and it survives a legal challenge, the Shull area of the county would be split between the 7th and 9th Congressional Districts. While the 9th District would be the state’s only Republican stronghold, the 7th District would resemble a lobster with a long tail starting in Democratic-dominated Arlington and two claws extending south into rural communities.
Congressional districts are typically redrawn once a decade, but President Donald Trump sparked a chain reaction last year by encouraging Texas Republicans to draw up a new map to help the party in November. After a series of redistricting efforts, Republicans believe they can pick up nine more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, while Democrats think they can pick up a total of six more seats in California and Utah. Virginia could give Democrats four additional seats — enough to overturn the Republican Party’s slim majority, at least as things stand.
“This is about making sure we respond to what Trump did,” said U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, D-Virginia. He added that the party needed to persuade voters that the referendum “was not about embracing gerrymandering.”
“I feel optimistic, but it’s close,” he said.
A rural-urban divide
The referendum comes at a time when Virginia Democrats are trying to catch up in rural areas. Last year, Democrat Abigail Spanberger campaigned for governors of oyster towns and agrarian hamlets to engage with more conservative voters. Prior to this winning campaign, she had represented a congressional district mixing urban suburbs, suburbs and adjacent rural communities.
“Anyone who does their job will listen to the communities they seek to represent,” Spanberger said.
But its results were mixed. In counties where fewer people lived in rural areas, she outperformed Democrat Kamala Harris’ Virginia in the 2024 presidential race by an average of 6 percentage points, or 7 percentage points. In more rural counties, Spanberger gained about 2 to 4 percentage points.
Democrat Anthony Flaccavento, a former congressional candidate and co-founder of the nonprofit Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, is torn over the referendum.
“In some ways, I feel like I’m taking a look down the road — something my party has been doing for a long time — when it comes to winning back rural and working-class voters,” Flaccavento said.
A welcome change for some
Rural Democrats, tired of being outnumbered by their Republican neighbors, embrace the redistricting plan.
“Fight, Vote Yes,” read a sign at an anti-Kings protest in Louisa County. A second said: “Vote yes. Stop ICE. No to kings.”
State Rep. Dan Helmer, who helped lead the redistricting effort, greeted the protesters and addressed the enthusiastic crowd. Helmer is now one of at least four Democrats running in the 7th District.
Helmer said Republicans “think that in red areas like Louisa and in rural areas, people don’t know what’s going on. But I look around me right now, I see strong, proud patriots who know exactly what’s going on, who know that we have a wannabe dictator trying to take away our democracy.”
Jennifer Lee, who has lived in Louisa for 33 years, said she looks forward to supporting the new district lines. Lee said she felt Republicans were perpetuating a double standard, falsely claiming the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden was stolen from Trump but accepting his desire to eliminate Democratic seats through gerrymandering.
“That’s their slogan, right? ‘Stop the steal,'” Lee said. “But they started to ‘steal’. They are now stealing seats in all these constituencies.”
Democrats see a fight for survival
At a town hall hosted by Democrats at a rural recreation center in Goochland County, voters munched on appetizers and handed out bottled water while debating whether redistricting violated some sort of moral code.
“I’m sorry, morality is going out the window right now. We have to do what we have to do to survive,” said Bruce Silverman, a local nephrologist. He voted “yes”.
At one point, Roberta Thacker-Oliver stood up to speak. She votes in the rural 9th District, which will become even more Republican with the new map.
“In redistricting, the 9th is going to get bigger and redder,” she said, adding, “I need to know what to say to my community about why they need to take one for the team.”
“What do we tell them? » she said.
____
Associated Press writers Maya Sweedler, Ashlyn Still and Joey Cappelletti in Washington contributed to this report.
